Happy New Year! We wanted to send out a quick update announcing the new features in Edit Flow v0.8.

New Feature: Dashboard Notepad

A simple, plain text notepad that allows admins and editors to leave notes that are visible to all users who have access to the dashboard. This is useful for leaving instructions, notes, or important announcements.

Enhancement: Post Management in Calendar

Quickly create posts or pitches by double clicking a day in the calendar.

Drag and drop posts to reschedule them to a different day.

Click on a post to see metadata and quickly access Edit, Trash, Preview or Follow buttons.

Enhancement: Subscribe to your editorial calendar

Subscribe to your calendar in iCal or Google Cal by enabling subscriptions in Calendar settings, and grabbing the secret URL in “Screen Options” on the calendar page.

Also of note: edit(orial) flow is coming to core for WordPress 3.6! This will mostly be bug fixes around custom statuses, but I’m hoping to release Edit Flow v0.8 around the same time. Let me know if you’d like to help with contributing.

Thanks to an awesome contribution from Daniel Chesterton, we have an oft-requested feature to give you today: custom statuses for contributors. Previously, your contributors and other users without the ‘publish_posts’ capability had two options, “Save as Draft” or “Submit for Review”. With Edit Flow v0.7.2, they can save content to any stage of your workflow.

Here’s what the submit meta box now looks like for your contributors:

You can use a simple filter to restrict your contributors to only changing specific statuses. If you did so, it would look like this:

In this release, we’ve also incorporated the following changes:

Support for trashing posts from the calendar. Thanks Dan York for the idea and a bit of code.

Updated codebase to use PHP5-style OOP references.

Fixed some script and stylesheet references that had a double ‘//’ in the URI path

New edit_flow_supported_module_post_types_args filter allows you to enable custom statuses and other modules for private post types

Coming to you live from a rainy Portland afternoon: Edit Flow v0.7.1. This is mostly a enhancements and bugfixes release with the following points of interest:

Shows the year on the calendar and story budget if it’s not the current year.

Allows users to save post subscriptions the first time they save the post. This also fixes the bug where a user wouldn’t be subscribed until they saved the post twice.

Changed the behavior of notifications for the user changing a status or leaving a comment. Previously, they’d receive an email with the action they just performed; now they do not. This can be changed with a filter.

New Italian localization thanks to Luca Patané.

Bug fix: Auto-subscribe the post author to their posts by default but make it filterable.

Bug fix: Only show “authors”, or contributors and above, in the user dropdown for the calendar and the story budget. This new behavior can be filtered out however.

We released Edit Flow v0.6.2 on Wednesday to fix two bugs. First, post titles now appear in all email notifications (thanks kfawcett and madguy000 for pointing this out). Second, bulking editing any post type should no longer inadvertently delete editorial metadata (thanks meganknight for pointing this out).

We released Edit Flow v0.6.1 yesterday. While the version number suggests a minor upgrade, we’ve put a lot of work into this release and have a number of new features, improvements and fixes that you’ll enjoy.

Note: Edit Flow v0.6 and above requires WordPress 3.0

Custom Post Type Support

Edit Flow now supports Custom Post Types

It’s a feature many of you have been asking for since Custom Post Types were added in WordPress 3.0. We’re happy to announce that Edit Flow is now custom post type-friendly. You can easily add or remove any Edit Flow feature to your custom post types with a few lines of code. We’ve included some code samples to get you started.

Note: Custom post statuses are now enabled for pages by default as we’ve removed the option from the settings. You can disable them if you’d like with the remove_post_type_support() method.

i18n (Internationalization)

We’ve heard many of our users across the world are interested in translating Edit Flow into their native languages. With this release, we’ve gone through and cleaned up the plugin to make that easy. If you’re interested in providing a translation for Edit Flow, please get in touch and we’ll gladly include it with the plugin. Pig latin is a language too!

Filtering Users and Usergroups

User and Usergroup search and filters

If you have a large list of users, you now how difficult it can be to scroll through and find the exact person you’re looking for. We’ve added filters and search-as-you-type to user and usergroup lists to make that a little easier.

Email Queueing

Emails sent by Edit Flow are now optimized to use queueing for improved performance (and to avoid being flagged as spam).

Bug Fixes

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs:

Users without JavaScript no longer see the status dropdown

Users with JavaScript no longer see the respond button for editorial comments

Contributors should not have the ability to publish through Quick Edit

Following a few months of development and countless hours of bug squashing, we are pleased to introduce Edit Flow v0.6. This release includes two brand new workflow features which continue to adapt WordPress for the publishing environment: editorial metadata and the story budget. In addition, our calendar has been rewritten from the ground up, and many bugs have been fixed.

We have a special treat for you with this release: a screencast video walking you through all the new stuff we’re so excited about. Take a look!

For those who prefer reading, here’s a breakdown of the new features:

Editorial Metadata

Our goal for editorial metadata is to make it easy to keep track of important information associated with every post, within every post. Contact information for the story’s sources? Saved in the sidebar. Required story length? Saved in the sidebar.

On Wednesday evening, I also had the chance to update our roadmap to 1.0. The next scheduled release is 0.6 and will feature such awesome goodness (we hope) as better support for custom post types, custom task lists, and a refactored editorial calendar with story budget view.